Vacuums are used for removing grain and other materials from a storage bin. Such vacuums necessarily include a large and heavy pipe and nozzle which must be moved over the floor of the storage bin from place to place to pick up the material to be removed.
Such vacuum hoses for transporting grain materials are necessarily relatively large diameter and therefore are relatively heavy. They must however be flexible sufficiently to allow the user to move the nozzle at the forward end of the hose to the required locations within the bin with the vacuum source located outside the bin.
Conventionally such vacuum hoses have been formed from flexible rubber or similar polymeric materials which have sufficient strength to avoid collapse under the interior vacuum and yet allow the required flexibility to curve the hose around a curvature sufficiently small to allow the nozzle to reach any location within the bin which is required. Such hoses are conventionally formed from transversely or circumferentially corrugated materials which provide the necessary hoop strength and yet allow flexing in the folding action of the corrugations in the manner of an accordion fold.
The flexible hose is connected at its forward end to a nozzle structure generally using a hose clamp for clamping the open end of the flexible hose portion around the outside of an end collar or just an end piece of the cylindrical nozzle section. Similarly the rear end of the hose is connected to an inlet duct at the vacuum source.
Various connections are known for coupling such flexible hoses and some connections are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,048,875 (Usui et al), issued Sep. 17th, 1991; U.S. Pat. No. 5,632,513 (Cassel), issued May 27th, 1997; U.S. Pat. No. 6,234,543 (Logan et al), issued May 22nd, 2001.
However these arrangements simply provide a connection between the conventional elongate section of flexible hose and a metal section.
One problem that arise with the hoses of this type is that the flow rate can be relatively low and it is necessary in all cases to obtain the maximum flow so as to increase the rate at which the material is extracted from the storage location to minimize the amount of time required.
In addition hoses of this type wear rapidly due to the dragging of the hose from place to place so the replacement of the lengthy hose section is often necessary with relatively high cost.